AIO I think my boyfriend is done with me after having a meltdown today
My boyfriend and I have been doing renovation projects in our apartment for the last couple of months. One of the last projects has been chipping and scraping off layers and layers of old paint from our door and window frames. It’s been such a nightmare because we both hate it. My boyfriend really hated the chipping part, so I took that on and he would paint. I hate it too, but it all needs to get done.
We’ve been working on this for quite a while, and at one point my boyfriend said he wanted us to be done by the time his mom came to visit in a month. I thought, okay, plenty of time, I also want to get it done.
Cut to his mom is coming in 2 days and we still have two frames left. We had a lot of stuff come up and only made little progress. I had already spent around 6 hours yesterday scraping and sanding one frame, and it’s super tedious and dusty work.
We had a disagreement in the evening about the plan to get everything done. He was talking about how I could finish sanding both frames tomorrow so he could start painting. He always does this where he completely underestimates how long these tasks take, despite this being the 5th frame we’ve worked on. There was no way I was finishing 2 in one evening after work. I told him it bothers me when he does that, and I repeated a few times that I wasn’t getting both done in an evening. He told me he didn’t want me to repeat myself, saying once is enough and he just wants me to try to be positive. Sure. I said I’d try to finish both.
Today I got home around 4pm and went straight to sanding. I spent 3 hours and was dusty as shit, but I was basically done with 1 frame. Okay, 1 to go. I called my boyfriend and he asked what I wanted to do for dinner. I explained that I’d finished one frame and wanted to clean up all the dust and shower before eating. He said I should just come get a pizza with him. I asked how bad it would be if we didn’t manage to finish the other frame by tomorrow, which was the latest it could be done for him to paint it in time. He said that wasn’t really an option.
So I explained that I would keep working because if I stopped to clean up and shower, I wouldn’t go back to working and wouldn’t have a chance of getting it done tomorrow because I also had other things I needed to do. I told him to go get the pizza himself. He came home half an hour later and brought some leftovers for me. Then he went to the living room while I kept sanding for almost another hour.
When I stopped for a break, I checked what he was doing and saw that he was watching TV. At this point I started feeling tilted, so I definitely didn’t come across friendly and asked him what his plan was. He said he’d been working all day, had just gotten home, and needed to relax a little. Usually I’m quite understanding of this, and I understand his work is long hours and he needs more time to wind down than I do. But I’d been sanding for 4 hours straight by then, and even more the day before, and there were other tasks we wanted to complete as well.
I got upset and told him I’d also been working all day. He said he didn’t want to talk to me if I was going to get upset. I asked if he was just not going to help. We went back and forth, and he said that he had asked me to get food with him and I refused because I wanted to keep working. I tried to explain that if I didn’t keep working, I had no chance of getting it done tomorrow. He said no one was making me work, and I asked if that meant it was okay if it didn’t get done. He said that we’d had over a month, so no, we better just finish it. At that point I told him that if he wanted it to get done by then, he needed to do it himself.
I went back to the frame and started cleaning up the mess. I was emotional and crying and just wanted to shower and eat by now. I tried to put the door back on the hinges, but it wouldn’t go on. I was crying more and more, and I knew he could hear me struggling but he wasn’t coming to help. I fully snapped and had a mental breakdown, put the door down and gave it a sad slap.
At that point he came in and exclaimed at me to calm down and that I was acting insane. Hearing that obviously didn’t help, so I told him to fuck off, which I regret because really I just wanted support and comfort.
Since then I’ve tried to talk to him, but he told me he didn’t want to talk. He says I acted completely insane and that my behaviour was unacceptable. I genuinely feel like he backed me into a corner, while he says I did that to myself.
I know that by having a mental breakdown I fully overreacted, but did I just create this situation for myself?